An extremely lightweight CNN model for the diagnosis of chest radiographs in resource‐constrained environments

Abstract Background In recent years, deep learning methods have been successfully used for chest x‐ray diagnosis. However, such deep learning models often contain millions of trainable parameters and have high computation demands. As a result, providing the benefits of cutting‐edge deep learning technology to areas with low computational resources would not be easy. Computationally lightweight deep learning models may potentially alleviate this problem. Purpose We aim to create a computationally lightweight model for the diagnosis of chest radiographs. Our model has only 0.14M parameters and 550 KB size. These make the proposed model potentially useful for deployment in resource‐constrained environments. Methods We fuse the concept of depthwise convolutions with squeeze and expand blocks to design the proposed architecture. The basic building block of our model is called D epthwise C onvolution I n S queeze and E xpand (DCISE) block. Using these DCISE blocks, we design an extremely lightweight convolutional neural network model (ExLNet), a computationally lightweight convolutional neural network (CNN) model for chest x‐ray diagnosis. Results We perform rigorous experiments on three publicly available datasets, namely, National Institutes of Health (NIH), VinBig ,and Chexpert for binary and multi‐class classification tasks. We train the proposed architecture on NIH dataset and evaluate the performance on VinBig and Chexpert datasets. The proposed method outperforms several state‐of‐the‐art approaches for both binary and multi‐class classification tasks despite having a significantly less number of parameters. Conclusions We design a lightweight CNN architecture for the chest x‐ray classification task by introducing ExLNet which uses a novel DCISE blocks to reduce the computational burden. We show the effectiveness of the proposed architecture through various experiments performed on publicly available datasets. The proposed architecture shows consistent performance in binary as well as multi‐class classification tasks and outperforms other lightweight CNN architectures. Due to a significant reduction in the computational requirements, our method can be useful for resource‐constrained clinical environment as well.